Little things I notice

I realised in Minneapolis that I missed the sounds of trains roaring up from below whenever I walked across a grate, something you experience in New York City. Funny the little things you notice.

Yesterday I walked past a little park down the street, the William M. Tighe Triangle. I hadn't realised a mammoth's tusk was found there in the late 1800s. It's now in the Natural History Museum - pity it's not actually here under reinforced glass; that would have had more atmosphere. And yesterday I also noticed a plaque that said that Dyckman's Farm, the old 1784 building on the corner,

was a camp for Hessian soldiers (hirelings of the British pursuing the American colonists) during the battle for New York.

We have just been down in Harlem, where once again we fell into conversation. The waitress, Tren, at the diner we just picked out by chance, started out by telling us about the healthful properties of honey and we ended up talking about language (nutrition and language being her two interests). She told us that, according to studies, Black English is less changeable than European English. It's transportable, a lingua franca. We talked also about Gullah and then I told her about the people on Tangiers Island in Chesapeake Bay who spoke a form of Elizabethan English, at least until quite recently.

We then moved on to the Schomburg Center for Research into Black Culture. They had on an exhibition of quilts by Sidis, descendants of Africans who started migrating to India 1,000 years ago; some, the descendants of Africans who were taken as slaves to Goa, all part of the African diaspora.

It's a jam-packed country, full of wonderful things even where you didn't expect to venture.